Who a Broadcast Can Reach
Matching your filter is not the same as being contactable.
What It Is
A broadcast audience has to clear two bars, not one.
First, the contact has to be in your audience — on the list you picked, or matching every condition of your filter.
Second, the contact has to be reachable on this channel. For an email broadcast that means they have not opted out of emails and they have an email address on file. For a text broadcast it means they have not opted out of texts and they have a mobile number.
The count the wizard shows you is the second number — the people who will actually be contacted.
Why It Matters
Without this, an audience could quietly shrink between what you saw and what was sent, and you would have no way of knowing why. Worse, a filter that matched three people who had all opted out would look like a filter that matched nobody — sending you off to debug conditions that were perfectly correct.
So the rule is applied in one place and reported plainly: excluded contacts are shown, not hidden, and scheduling tells you which of the two things happened.
How It Works
In the audience preview, a contact who cannot be reached appears locked:
- their name is struck through
- the reason sits beside it — Opted out of emails, No email address, Opted out of texts, No mobile number
- the checkbox is disabled, so you cannot select them by hand
- select-all and deselect-all pass over them
- they are not counted in the audience total, and not in the cost
A note above the table totals them: how many were excluded, and why.
The preview still opens when every matching contact is excluded. That is the case where you most need to see the reasons.
Where a contact fails on both counts — opted out and no address — the opt-out is the reason shown, because it is the one that lasts. Adding an address later will not bring them back into the audience; withdrawing their opt-out would.
Examples
A filter matches 3 contacts and scheduling refuses
If all three have opted out, you are told exactly that: three contacts match this audience, but none of them can be reached. That is a different problem from an empty filter, and the message says which one you have.
The same contact in an email campaign and a text campaign
Opt-out is per channel. Someone who has opted out of emails but kept texts is excluded from one campaign and included in the other. The reason shown is specific to the channel you are sending on.
A contact you simply do not want in this campaign
Deselect them in the preview. That is a choice you can undo, which is why a deselected row looks different from a locked one — locked is a fact about the contact, deselected is a decision about this campaign.
Info: Opt-out is checked twice: once when the audience is enrolled, and again at the moment of sending. A contact who opts out while the campaign is running is not contacted.
